Advances in Hyperspectral Image Classification: Earth monitoring with statistical learning methods

Hyperspectral images show similar statistical properties to natural grayscale or color photographic images. However, the classification of hyperspectral images is more challenging because of the very high dimensionality of the pixels and the small number of labeled examples typically available for learning. These peculiarities lead to particular signal processing problems, mainly characterized by indetermination and complex manifolds. The framework of statistical learning has gained popularity in the last decade. New methods have been presented to account for the spatial homogeneity of images, to include user's interaction via active learning, to take advantage of the manifold structure with semisupervised learning, to extract and encode invariances, or to adapt classifiers and image representations to unseen yet similar scenes. This tutuorial reviews the main advances for hyperspectral remote sensing image classification through illustrative examples.Comment: IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, 201

Spectral-spatial classification of hyperspectral images: three tricks and a new supervised learning setting

Spectral-spatial classification of hyperspectral images has been the subject of many studies in recent years. In the presence of only very few labeled pixels, this task becomes challenging. In this paper we address the following two research questions: 1) Can a simple neural network with just a single hidden layer achieve state of the art performance in the presence of few labeled pixels? 2) How is the performance of hyperspectral image classification methods affected when using disjoint train and test sets? We give a positive answer to the first question by using three tricks within a very basic shallow Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture: a tailored loss function, and smooth- and label-based data augmentation. The tailored loss function enforces that neighborhood wavelengths have similar contributions to the features generated during training. A new label-based technique here proposed favors selection of pixels in smaller classes, which is beneficial in the presence of very few labeled pixels and skewed class distributions. To address the second question, we introduce a new sampling procedure to generate disjoint train and test set. Then the train set is used to obtain the CNN model, which is then applied to pixels in the test set to estimate their labels. We assess the efficacy of the simple neural network method on five publicly available hyperspectral images. On these images our method significantly outperforms considered baselines. Notably, with just 1% of labeled pixels per class, on these datasets our method achieves an accuracy that goes from 86.42% (challenging dataset) to 99.52% (easy dataset). Furthermore we show that the simple neural network method improves over other baselines in the new challenging supervised setting. Our analysis substantiates the highly beneficial effect of using the entire image (so train and test data) for constructing a model.Comment: Remote Sensing 201